December 28, 2011 | 3:20 PM | By

The cultural mashup dictionary: Gentefication

FILED UNDER: Boyle Heights, Cultural mashup dictionary, Eastside Luv, Gente, Gentefication, Gentrification, MorrisseyOke

Photo by Texas T/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I first heard the term “gentefication” uttered a few years ago by the proprietor of Eastside Luv, a Boyle Heights wine bar that opened on First Street during the height of the real estate boom and rising fear of gentrification in the historic seat of Mexican American Los Angeles.

At the time, locals were becoming worried (they still are) over encroaching development from the west, including the still-standing plans for an upscale redevelopment of the neighborhood’s vast Wyvernwood Gardens apartment complex. In the midst of this, Guillermo Uribe, a young Mexican American investor with L.A. roots farther east, had taken over and renovated the former Metropolitan, a former mariachi bar across from Mariachi Plaza. At the time, the corner’s best view was of Gold Line construction.

Some locals were worried about the new wine bar, too. Even as a Latino-owned business, was it a harbinger of higher rents? It has since become a popular gathering spot for a mostly second-generation crowd, many of them professionals with Eastside roots. In an email last week, after reconnecting with Uribe over a KPCC radio segment about Eastside Luv’s regular MorrisseyOke nights, he used the term again:

“I’ve flipped the gentrification issue to GENTEfication…all better,” he wrote.

Gente is, of course, Spanish for “people.” So I’ll offer my attempt at a definition here:

gen·te·fi·ca·tion (hen-te-fi-kā-shun), noun: The process of upwardly mobile Latinos, typically second-generation and beyond, investing in and returning to the old neighborhood.

The question remains as to whether Boyle Heights will truly gentrify, eventually attracting affluent non-Latino investors and residents who can pay higher rents in the wake of what has become a thriving Latino arts and entertainment scene. Perched on the edge of downtown, there’s a strong chance it might.  But for now, it still belongs to the gente.

For the uninitiated, Multi-American’s cultural mashup dictionary is a collection of occasional entries, bits and pieces of the evolving lexicon of words, terms and phrases coined as immigrants and their descendants influence the English language, and it influences them.

Entries have included informal coinages like Tweecanos, as used on Twitter, and Spanglish terms like Googlear and Twittear and Feisbuk. The series kicked off last spring with the etymology of the term 1.5 generation. Have suggestion for an entry? Feel free to post it below.

  • Anonymous

    yeah, why don’t we pump in more drugs and open up more liquor stores to raise the crime rate just so we can keep whitey out and the rent low. Idiot.

  • Boylehieghtspv

    difficult to decipher sarcasm in a txt, but assuming that mcem33 is being sarcastic to make a point that the goal is to keep “whitey out & the rent low” then I think he’s missing the point. Gentefication is implying that the improvements needed in the community can come from within. In other words, that new retailers, & such, are representative of the mexican american folks already there. I don’t think anybody would want to stay in poverty & raise the crime rate just to keep others out. Typically the goal is to improve ones own situation to be able to afford to get out of the “hood”, but now with the urbanization trend across the country & the downturn in the economy, Boyle Heights is finding it’s professionals staying put or coming back home along with other like minded gente. This has resulted in Gentefication… idiotA

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Eduardo-Bedoy/100000929798460 Eduardo Bedoy

    This has been an intriguing subject matter; I live in Highland Park born and raised since the crazy days…. sorry
    but theirs no cute side to gentrification.  And watch
    out for white guilt because white people hate that the word gentrification even
    exist. Then u got the middle class Chicken-os with internalized white guilt and
    the whole I feel insecure cause I am mono-lingualicaly disabled thing going
    on… and everybody wants to sugar coat inequality or else the pan dulce just
    makes u feel guilty (and not cause of the calories).   (Exhibit A MCEM33
    comment).

     

     Gentrification for me is a word
    that describes a mechanism that uses racism (and other isms too.) to disempower
    racial minorities and is used as a tool to position them in exploitive
    circumstances; thus the ghetto…While at the same reestablishing the wealth and privileges
    of the haves over the have not’s.   

     

    Let me say it this way; yes it’s nice that your putting bars in
    the hood so that you and your trendy friends don’t get dui’s driving from the Westside
    or Silver lake… but it would have been nice for me and mi Gente too… along with
    the new schools, metro links, and the working class’s taxes being used to
    subsidize the neighborhood cause we wouldn’t want you to loose on your
    investment in the hood… When the investment that concerned and concerns those
    that are being gentrified is the investment or lack there of, of their children
    and their children’s future…

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Eduardo-Bedoy/100000929798460 Eduardo Bedoy
  • kw